Wikipedia Bans Church of Scientology

Wired News/May 29, 2009

By Ryan Singel

Wikipedia has banned the Church of Scientology from editing any
articles. It’s a punishment for repeated and deceptive editing of
articles related to the controversial religion. The landmark ruling
comes from the inner circle of a site that prides itself on being open
and inclusive.

In a 10-1 ruling Thursday, the site’s arbitration council voted to ban
users coming from all IP addresses owned by the Church of Scientology
and its associates, and further banned a number of editors by name.
The story was first reported by The Register.

Self-serving Wikipedia edits are hardly new. Wired.com readers pulled
in an award for discovering the most egregious Wikipedia whitewashes
by corporation and government agencies, but this is the first time the
site has taken such drastic actions to block those edits.

And the edits are unlikely to stop, now that the user-created
encyclopedia has become one of the net’s most popular sites and is
often the top result for searches on a subject. Being able to massage
an entry about oneself or one’s company has proven difficult to
resist, even for founder Jimmy Wales - despite Wikipedia’s official
warnings to the contrary.

The Church of Scientology, founded by sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard in
1953, has had a long and bloody history on the net - dating back to
Usenet groups, where critics maintain that the organization is a cult
that brainwashes its members and sucks them dry financially. The
Church, which teaches that humans are reincarnated and lived on other
planets, says it is a legitimate religion.

The case, which began in December, centers on more than 400 articles
about the ultra-secretive Church and its members. Those pages have
hosted long-running, fierce edit wars that pitted organized Church of
Scientology editors - using multiple accounts - against critics of
Scientology who fought those changes by citing their own or one
another’s self-published material. In fact, this is the fourth
Wikipedia arbitration case concerning Scientology in as many years.

The committee also banned a number of editors individually,
prohibiting them from editing any Scientology-related articles for at
least six months. Those privileges can be reinstated afterward if they
show they can play nicely by Wikipedia’s rules.

While most disputes involving the Web and Scientology in the past year
have involved anti-Scientology activists who bind together under the
name Anonymous, that group is largely not involved in this argument,
because only registered accounts are able to edit the articles under
dispute.

The Church of Scientology did not immediately return a voice message,
asking for comment.

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